in person

with John Markland

July 22nd - september 9th

I’m currently coaching of 4 horror films two franchise and two indies… it is the genre I have been asked to coach on more than any other. The number one question actors ask me is how do I act for horror? The question behind this is how to a create tension and how to I repeat it take after take? The state you want to live in is dread.

Horror lives in the breath you don’t release… in the step you don’t finish… in the body that knows before the mind will admit it. Most actors play the scare. The scare is nothing. It’s a scream. The moment before the scream is where horror lives. The dread is everything, the tightening, the wanting to look away, the helplessness. You want to be able to engage and embody anticipation and hold it till it becomes unbearable, and then a little longer.

Over eight weeks we will go where you flinch. Your nightmares are not noise, they are the richest soil you own, the Shadow rehearsing in the dark. We will bring that to the camera and learn to hold it, take after take, without it ever going cold. And one night we will leave the room entirely… a class out into the dark, where the body stops pretending and finally tells the truth.

Fear is a spiral of the imagination. The imagination plants seeds in the senses. You need to know where and how to put them in.

You will listen like the hunted animal. You will learn to conserve the charge instead of burning it before they roll. You will make the unknown live in the room again, every single time, so the tenth take is as alive as the first. And you will discover that tension is not what you express, it is what you refuse to release.

You’ll dread it. That’s the door.